The PTA Disbands

Background

After a field trip to Fort Springfield ends with Uter beaten by Civil War reenactors, Krabappel calls out Skinner's cuts to bus maintenance, staff salaries, food and teaching materials, and Bart stokes the quarrel until she calls the strike. With school closed, Lisa grows obsessed with being graded. When an emergency PTA meeting cannot break the impasse, Ned Flanders invokes the school's contingency plan of volunteer teachers: Professor Frink, Jasper, and finally Marge, who becomes Bart's teacher after his pranks drive Moe and the other substitutes away.

Bart then locks Krabappel and Skinner in the principal's office until they agree to rent the cloakrooms out to house convicts from the overcrowded Springfield Penitentiary, which pays for the teachers' return. Despite the title, the PTA never disbands: Mirkin chose it to tease Crittenden, who thought the most exciting part of a strike would be the PTA possibly disbanding, and added a man who jumps out of a window on hearing that it has disbanded and climbs back in when told it has not.

The strike story drew on Mirkin's own childhood experience of schools running out of money. In its first broadcast the episode finished 69th in the ratings for its week with a Nielsen rating of 7.1. Lisa's perpetual-motion machine and Homer's line about obeying the laws of thermodynamics put it on Nature's 2007 list of the top ten science moments in The Simpsons.